March 2022 Newsletter
Dear Friends of Endeavor,
2022 has started off apace within the Endeavor community and South Africa at large. Our South Africa team is now supporting +100 high-growth entrepreneurs, up from 50 teams two years ago. A wonderful ‘good news story’ especially as they are powerful revenue & job growth engines. Thank you to all our partners, mentors and board who made this possible (read more Endeavor SA 2021 Impact report)
We ended off last year highlighting Endeavor’s role, along with other startup ecosystem stakeholders, in fostering the development of the Startup Act for South Africa and we were encouraged to hear the focus of the President’s SONA address on creating a more business-friendly climate.
At Endeavor, our focus continues to be on all aspects of building a healthy startup ecosystem; one that enables high-growth entrepreneurs to thrive and through this drive revenue growth, job creation & overall economic growth.
The 2021 performance of the Endeavor and the SA SME Fund’s Local Scale Up (LSU) cohort [18 Tech startups with Annual Revenue ranging from R5m to R150m] is as strong as the portfolio of our 30 Endeavor Entrepreneurs that we shared in December 2021. In 2021, the LSU cohort collectively grew their revenue by 514%, created an additional 400 jobs and raised R1bn capital. The performance has been in the news and in an interview Melvyn highlighted the need for support of ecosystems and the “knowledgeable other” such as the mentor and founder network of Endeavor
Investment in Africa is now growing faster than any other area in the world according to the recent Partech report; Venture investment in Africa in 2021 was just shy of $6billion growing 3.5x verse 2020 and even with this growth Africa VC market represents only 1% of the ~$643billion Global VC market. Our Harvest Fund II kept up its pace and is on track to double existing funds raised and more importantly investments made and we’ve extended its final close by two months to the early April 2022 given increased demand. In this quarter we announced investments into emerging entrepreneur Synatic as well as Tymebank who recently raised $180m led by Tencent and CDC. Entersekt, a global leader in device identity and authentication solutions, likewise successfully raised a Series C round led Accel-KKR, a leading technology-focused private equity firm. Marking our 10th investment, we invested in Clickatell $91m Series C round. Clickatell now serves +28 000 companies across 960 mobile operators in over 220 countries and territories. These are all great examples of what happens when an entrepreneur dreams big, executes a solid plan to scale fast and in so doing puts South African businesses on the international stage.
As part of our ongoing work to put South Africa on the international investment map, we supported the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of African Affairs Akunna Cook and Leslie Marbury Acting COO of Prosper Africa on their South Africa leg of their four country tour including South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria and Kenya. They hosted an insightful conversation on TwitterSpaces on accelerating US investment in African entrepreneurs, Listen here https://t.co/1Grihp8n86 Endeavor South Africa is proud to be partnering with USAID to drive investment & entrepreneurship in Africa.
It is great to see the accelerated expansion of Endeavor entrepreneurs through partnerships and mergers and acquisition, globally and across Africa. The collaboration between Ozow and Zapper and the leveraging of their respective strengths, infrastructure and markets enables better financial access and choice for consumers is a good recent example of this. As is MFS Africa’s partnership with PAPSS, (Pan African Payment and Settlement System) that stimulates intra-Africa trade, empowered millions of small and micro African businesses by facilitating cross-border payments in Africa. And SweepSouth’s acquisition of Egyptian Start-Up Filkhedma.
We look forward to sharing more positive stories in the year and to demonstrating that high-growth, high-impact entrepreneurs are able to buck the local and global trends and deliver revenue growth and job creation despite the macro environments in which they operate.
